Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley warned that Special Counsel Jack Smith is “no Alvin Bragg” and argued that Smith’s indictment of former President Donald Trump over classified documents “is a different ball game” from the one playing out in Manhattan over so-called hush money to an ex-stripper.
The Fox News contributor joined “America’s Newsroom” on Friday to discuss the differences between the two cases.
(Video: Fox News)
“I know a lot of people have criticized Smith for his background, but he’s no Alvin Bragg,” Turley said, referring to the opportunistic Manhattan District Attorney. “He’s a serious prosecutor.”
“The Alvin Bragg prosecution is a political prosecution. It is what Trump says it is. It is a weaponization of the criminal justice system, in my view,” Turley explained. “This is a different ball game.”
As BizPacReview reported, the unprecedented indictment was unsealed on Friday, revealing 37 felony counts, including 31 counts under the Espionage Acts of ‘willful retention’ of classified records.
Turley called it “extremely damning.”
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“It is an extremely damning indictment. There are indictments that are sometimes called narrative or speaking indictments. These are indictments that are really meant to make a point as to the depth of the evidence,” he said.
“There are some indictments that are just bare bones,” he continued. “This is not. The special counsel knew that there would be a lot of people who were going to allege that the Department of Justice was acting in a biased or politically motivated way. This is clearly an indictment that was drafted to answer those questions.”
The devil, Turley cautioned, is in the details… and according to his assessment, there are a lot of them.
“It’s overwhelming in details,” he stated. “And, you know, the Trump team should not fool itself, these are hits below the waterline. These are witnesses who apparently testified under oath, gave statements to federal investigators, both of which can be criminally charged if they’re false. Those witnesses are directly quoting the president in encouraging others not to look for documents or allegedly to conceal them. It’s damaging.”
As reported, the “Trump team” has a different take on the situation.
Following the indictment, Trump’s attorney Jim Trusty went on CNN and dismissed what Trump has called “the Boxes Hoax” as “garbage.”
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“Look, he knows he’s innocent,” Trusty told CNN host Kaitlan Collins. “He knows this is garbage. He knows there’s fundamental flaws with each one of the counts that they’re apparently putting in this indictment. And he knows that the whole process, starting from the archivist, was a corrupt and politicized one.”
According to the attorney, the Espionage Act charge is “ludicrous under the facts of this case,” and the false statement charges are, “kind of a crazy stretch.”
But Turley said the indictment must be taken ” very seriously.”
“[F]or the last two years, some of us have been saying this was the greatest threat facing Donald Trump,” he said. “There are a lot of torpedoes in the water, but this is the one that some of us have been flagging for a long time. It is a serious threat.”
“Obstruction of justice, false statements are called the darlings of federal prosecutors,” Turley explained. “They bring these charges all the time, and they are largely successful. You have to take this very seriously.”
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Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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